Beeing There
I’m waiting just past sunrise for a man with a new colony of bees. I set up their hive last night and woke at 3, realising I hadn’t made some sugar syrup as a welcoming feeding gesture for our new friends. I got up and filled the kettle in the dark.
It’s not that things have gone well for us on the bee front in recent months: a swarm departed in mid-spring, a new queen was killed by the remnant colony, but for now our one hive is going hammer and tongs after we installed a new and very active queen, and we thought, why not double down and start another. So ...
I’m waiting and reading, flicking through the news.
An explainer piece unravelling Trump’s talk of taking over Greenland blithely mentions that Greenland’s receding ice cover is making new oil, gas and rare mineral exploration possible. And that various countries are excited about the possibility of new shipping routes as arctic sea ice recedes.
It’s the beginning of a rather menacing time I suspect. Trump looms: a study in the grotesque realities of power. Zuckerberg has bent the knee; I guess the temptation to join the other tech heavies as either supplicants or active members of he regime must have been strong.
Isn’t that the way this works? I often wonder at how a people can been dragooned to evil purpose. The most obvious and chilling example is Nazi Germany of course. A democratically elected man becomes a hysterical demagogue whose acts of evil extremity carry the mute or active assent of his country’s people. He was making Germany great again, after all.
There will be a sliding scale of normalisation as Trump begins he work in the US ... well, there already has been. This is a political figure unimaginable 30, 20 years ago. Inconceivable probably before the age that drove his initial popularity: the culture shaping age of the reality TV anti-hero. Outwit, outrun, outrage.
Presumably that’s the point of the Greenland, Panama, Gulf of America rhetoric, to have us look ‘over there’ while Trump begins the other work of jailing enemies, pardoning loyalists, caging undocumented children.
I wonder how far countries like ours will let this run before raising objections, signalling our disgust. Or are we already all-in on the American project, however it turns?
The prospect of it all sits heavily. The fact is a leader like Trump just meshes into that broader modern reality, where the consequences of our slow strangulation through climate change are seen as an opportunity for more extraction, more natural exploitation. A world of constant blithe violence.
The strong temptation is to withdraw. Find the true simple peace of nature. Tend plants and bees, watch the greater world a little tremulously over the shoulder.
Self care. Perhaps it’s the best that can be done.
When I think about the looming of Trump, even allowing for the extent of the bloviation & bluster, my heart sinks. Then there's Gaza, about which it's so painful to even think, and Sudan, where millions starve and we don't even think at all. And Ukraine, of course, where the daily battle and grind to survive goes on.
One little person! Try to acknowledge one's good fortune & a degree of self care is about all one can do - and try to be kinder tomorrow.
What you've expressed is exactly what I feel.
I often wondered what the people alive during Hitler's reign and downfall thought at the time it was all happening. Now I'm getting to find out.
It has been fascinating to watch this unfolding, and since the politics in our own country is so disappointing now that I can barely look, I find myself following American politics instead. Almost like I might watch some long-running mini-series. A real-life psychological thriller.
Initially I felt that we were safe over here in Australia, but things are escalating at a really extreme rate since Trump got elected and I'm realising that hate and ugliness is a significant part of who we are as people now - everywhere! It scares me.
The power is multiplying exponentially in all the wrong people and it's horrifying. Trump and Musk know no boundaries!! Psychopaths, the both of them.
My instinct too, is to withdraw into my home, my garden. Steer clear of it all.
I'm pretty sure that at times like this we are supposed to gather our strength and not look away; keep fighting back, but god it's hard. It feels like this movement (hate, greed, raping the planet) is still growing and spreading. And they don't fight fair. You have to become them to beat them and I just can't do that.